


the twilight kingdom

by liminal



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:41:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminal/pseuds/liminal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"... death's twilight kingdom<br/>The hope only<br/>Of empty men" - T S Eliot</p><p>"In modern war... you will die like a dog for no good reason" - Hemingway</p><p>Bucky in five parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the twilight kingdom

**Author's Note:**

> Works best if read alongside Eliot's full poem.
> 
> References to Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, Wilfred Owen's 'Insensibility', Herbert Read's 'My Company' and Isaac Rosenberg's 'The Immortals'

I 

_We are the hollow men  
We are the stuffed men_

Bang bang go the bombs and the guns and the bodies as they hit the ground, life rushing out of them in a torrent, if luck has it, or slowly seeping into the mud, if the world refuses this one last dignity. As, in truth, it so often does these days because war is nothing but an exercise in degradation, a scientific study concocted by whatever forces reign supreme to push boundaries and probe the weak spots, the chinks in the armour. Anderson oozes his way to death, three bullets in his body and not one hitting a vital organ that would have sent him to the Other Side with twice the blood but half the agony. Jackson keeps talking trash and weeping when the morphine kicks in until the burns do everyone, including the kid himself, a favour. Henning falls to dysentery, which is cruel enough to be funny. 

But not to Bucky, who smirks at the first joke and is bored by the third. Who doesn’t turn back to put pressure on the holes that ripped Anderson apart, who doesn’t know if that’s because he can’t or won’t or daren’t. Who thinks Jackson needs a lesson in trash talking the Brooklyn way, but is disinclined to give him one and waste his breath; who finds Steve in Jackson’s slight blond build and himself in the metallic glint in the kid’s eye, a glint which only got sharper and brighter as the war went on while Bucky’s shining buttons dulled and his uniform faded, more mud than khaki-coloured cotton.

At night, the horrors come to him in glorious technicolour and sometimes he thinks of the World’s Fair and all that shiny plastic Stark had offered the world. At night, he sees his life in Brooklyn in faded sepia and sometimes he cries out for the world as he had known it back then; all hair gel and pretty girls and finding Steve in back alleys and laughing.

Long-range is Bucky’s speciality, if given the choice, but the cross-finder lets him examine German faces up close, lets him read their lips and see the tears fall and occasionally he thinks that he can hear their last prayer as he shoots them cleanly. Cleanly, because each of those men had a life of hair gel and pretty girls and dumb jerk friends and laughing; and in a world where the boundaries of acceptability, of human behaviour and humanity itself are indiscriminate and invisible, a little man-made dignity is more than what the universe has to offer.

In the beginning, when his buttons are still shiny and there is some starch left in his uniform, Bucky chooses to be less than human, to feel as little as possible when he pulls the trigger and sees death’s other Kingdom welcome another inhabitant. But the shine and the polish and the starch wear out, and so too does Bucky’s choice as he hardens automatically to the metallic slaughter.

II

_There, the eyes are_  
 _Sunlight on a broken column_  
 _There, is a tree swinging_  
 _And voices are_  
 _In the wind’s singing_  
 _More distant and more solemn_  
 _Than a fading star_

It is quiet in the laboratory that has become Bucky’s room, comfortable in the chair that has become his bed; peaceful in the reality that has become his own, a reality in which he swims in clouded unconsciousness and washes up occasionally on harrowing shores before drifting back out again. 

The man with the accent and the injections and the nasal laugh asks why he doesn’t pray like all the other men before him have, why he doesn’t beg for mercy and deliverance. 

Because there is a void in my soul, because it has been wrenched apart and spread by the four winds of the world to the four corners of the world. Because I stand at the edges of reality and on familiar ground. Because Hell is real and I am in it, Bucky wants to say. Tries to say. Doesn’t say, only stares back at the man with a gaze that would once have been defiant but has become irrelevant and empty.

One thing touches him in his world of nothingness, and that is Steve. His is the face that Bucky sees awake or asleep, screaming in pain or smiling in numbness; the face that Bucky cannot run from or hide from or embrace and hold close. Steve refusing to take handouts or charity, panting after going at it with a man twice his size, more muscle than brain where Steve is all heart. Steve lying prone on the concrete, broken glass all around him and a cut face gushing blood, promising Bucky all the while that he had the guy on the ropes. But Steve, of all the people from back home, of all the faces and all the memories, is the one person Bucky doesn’t want. Not here, where he can’t be strong for him. Not here, where Bucky is the one on the ropes. Not here, where nightmares and nausea and numbness combine and create Hell. So Bucky pushes him away, pushes Steve into the sole patch of sunlight left in this world while he pushes himself out to sea and takes on the guise of all the creatures of the dark to better disguise himself.

A hand on his shoulder and a voice that brings back home fetches Bucky out of the darkness more effectively than any of the scientist’s injections ever did, but they catapult him back to Hell with equal efficacy. Steve, but Not Steve. Still blond, still saying dumb stuff and doing dumb things, but he’s bigger and broader and better than Bucky is or was; and Bucky sees and feels himself heading towards that twilight kingdom, where his real Steve waits.

 

III

_Here the stone images_  
 _Are raised, here they receive_  
 _The supplication of a dead man’s hand_  
 _Under the twinkle of a fading star_

Steve rambles on about hot water, how a hot shower will make Bucky feel better. Mothers him in a way that’s remarkable for someone who spent a good two decades years being mothered himself. Mothers him in a way that Bucky used to mother him, and it’s all Bucky can do to stop himself from lashing out because this is not how things are supposed to be.

Steve is not supposed to be fighting. He is not supposed to be a captain, to be a hero, to embody the American flag hoisted high above camp, to be the guy who saves the day.

That is Bucky’s role, always was and always should be, according to the natural order of things. But that turn of phrase makes Bucky laugh, and it’s a low guttural bitter sound: there is nothing natural about any of this, and his veins have been cold for far too long for hot water to make any difference.

He joins Steve’s ranks because the mother and the hero instincts are too strong to be kicked; trains his eye and shoots even more cleanly than he ever did, simultaneously watches out for Steve and wonders if his uniform could repel a bullet from his gun, fired with his accuracy and precision. The old order is fading and memories of hauling Steve up from the sidewalk turn grey as Steve offers him a helping hand. This hulking beast of a skinny Brooklyn kid.

But he’d take it all back in an instant if he could, as he lies and dies in the snow beneath the mountain-top train track. He cries and slurs and begs for the brothers he never addressed as such before as the life ekes out of him, drop of blood by ruptured artery. The haziness of Zola’s cell returns, but this time he clings to the shores and offers up prayers and benedictions and fuck you’s to whoever is listening.

Only to realise that nobody is, that the train carried on without him and Steve could do nothing as he fell. That he is, for the first time, truly alone and it is this which leads him to prayer when he was unable to muster one for Zola. Before, there was hope and Steve and hope of Steve and no need to beg, but now there is fresh snow everyday which turns the world black-and-white and Steve is one of those distant stars that Bucky sees in the night sky.

He offers no prayers when he awakens again under Zola’s needle. In death’s other kingdom, where he now rests, there is no hope for the living or the dead and no point in praying to broken stone or fallen idols.

IV

_The eyes are not here_  
 _There are no eyes here_  
 _In this valley of dying stars_

He kills and follows orders and is known to no one who does not need to know him; does not need to rest safe in the knowledge that there are no eyes searching for him anyway. All eyes are dead eyes, save for those that communicate a message of further slaughter. He sleeps in cold and treads the line between life and death with all the grace of one with a foot planted firmly on each side.

There are eyes which confuse him and start to shift the ice from his veins until they are purged from his memory.

There are eyes which trace every line of his face as if they have earned the right to be so familiar. There are eyes which apologise with every punch and eyes which give up and glisten a little. There are eyes which stare up at him as they fall back down to earth, which close as death approaches and flutter a little on the shore.

There are eyes which promise salvation and the Soldier wonders what a prayer is.

V

_Between the idea_  
 _And the reality_  
 _Between the motion_  
 _And the act_  
 _Falls the Shadow_  
 _For Thine is the Kingdom_

Time and pain and anger all pass before Bucky stops longing for death and embraces the other option, tentatively sticking out a metallic hand to grasp what is possible. He lets Stark tiptoe around the circuitry in his arm while the genius goes on about turning his beloved tower into a care home for geriatrics, lets Fury tell him what Pierce meant by ‘shaping the century’. He lets Barton train his eye again, proves to him why he was the best sharpshooter America had ever seen. He lets himself talk to Natasha in Russian, but only gradually; one time, early on, he tells her that she has the grace of a ballerina and her expression is so pained, her reply so scathing that for a long time he keeps the Russian to basic phrases until he has a better idea of how to handle her.

Winter ice melts, though, given enough sun, and with the lowering of his guard comes memories and emotions blocked up and suppressed seventy years ago. They come through in dribs and drabs and he spends a whole day in a dark room by himself, apologising for not turning around for Anderson, for not spending time showing Jackson how to trash-talk the Brooklyn way.

Steve understands, lets him find his own way in this new world that neither of them, according to the natural order, were supposed to live to see. But their rooms in Stark Tower have interconnecting doors, and more often than not, Bucky awakes after dreams where the seas threaten to drag him away from the shore to find Steve snoring on the couch in his room, and Sam Wilson in the armchair. 

One day, Bucky asks where the nearest Russian Orthodox church is, and it is there that he thanks God for his deliverance.

_This is the way the world ends  
 _Not with a bang, but a whimper._ _


End file.
